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Little dunes grow big by stealing sand

IT’S a dune eat dune world out there, say researchers studying how different sizes of sand dune interact.

Dunes get blown along by the wind, but small ones move faster so researchers had thought they just climb over the big ones and keep going. Now a computer model of crescent-shaped dunes developed by Veit Schwämmle and Hans Herrmann at the University of Stuttgart in Germany has shown this isn’t so. Instead, when a small dune crashes into a bigger one, it steals most of the sand and emerges as the bigger one.